Search Results

after Julie Mehretu, “A Love Supreme” dancing directionless doodles dirty the sidewalk of my chalky childhood masterpieces hazy hues of pastel no never any match against the rain my mind a wasteland of faces that did not stay a ribcage that isn’t mine nerves replacing memories like loose strands of hair a nightmare unwilling to open my eyes glass sweating the perfect opportunity my index cuts through a path from beginning to end my sky cries with me obscuring visuals of sense my reflection a burning city stenciled erasers of loss nerves as black lines nerves anyway nothing left to lose my mind a wasteland wasting supreme love does not live here hair around its neck suffocation suppresses words that aren’t mine my mind a wasteland nerves as black lines stenciled erasers of loss a nightmare unwilling a sky that cries with me nerves as black lines nerves as black lines how did I get here

WAR Be confident, cocky, controlling, charismatic, and you’re Her captain. Be negligent, willing, dull, violent, and you’re Her soldier. Be wicked, vicious, a harbinger of death, different, and you’re Her enemy. You’re never the Victim or the Saviour or an Innocent in the eyes of War. To be those would make you Her enemy, Her hatred and fuel, Her survival. But She cares naught for us so why should we feed Her? Why don’t we fight back and leave Her? Why don’t we kill Her with Peace, Their bow everlasting and clear, loving and indiscriminate, War’s bloodshed, War’s weakness? We have the numbers and we can harness Peace’s guiding light, yet we instead morph Their Glory for War’s purposes. Be forgiving, destroyed, depressed, disgusted by Her ways, and you’re weak. Be loving, unrelenting, hopeful, courageous, and you’re wrong. Fight back, win your love for your fellow man, be a prophet of Peace, and you need to be killed, silenced, replaced. We crave War, feed from Her as She does us, a cyclical silencing that we can escape only in death. It doesn’t have to be this way.. War is weak. Let Her die. Let us breathe new life into the lungs She cauterized so long ago, that my ancestors pierced with blades of obsidian in their attempt to feed our hearts to the god they feared, to feed Her. Peace can survive without War. They can live without Her dichotomous rage, but War cannot live without Peace. There is no end to Peace, nor to Their many Children, but War ends. We will survive, and we will not relent until War succumbs to Them. Or we will die trying

I know you hide from me But sometimes I wish you stood next to me Wrapped your arms around me I want you near We feel like one I want to be two parts Come together if necessary You’re the color of bravery I think I might love you Sleep in you I feel like a cloud next to you But too light I can’t hold In the distance I know it’s you Closer I’m more aware Of the power you hold And how I wish it was me Who created you. My hands aren’t that steady.

It’s never cold Always dark Or maybe I just don’t look right I’m left to decide how to feel about you The color of sadness Yet I feel no head bow The color of tears Mine have yet to fall I wish to dig deeper I picture you in my brain Swimming with thoughts and ideas and plans some that’ll never surface But wade into what it could’ve been And what it can still be You’re the color of brand new How you shift and pull me into you But you’re vast And hard to understand And somedays I wonder If I am supposed to understand you at all.

misting magpies over as a child, I begged for nicknames mayflies metanyms everything with the flock of mes tried to establish them myself of overlapping pseudonyms I longed to disappear like those rare few called a fog nothing diffused through twice the historical record into dissolved

Mila wonders why her position even exists anymore. Maybe it made some sense in more olden times, but now, just why? Shouldn’t we have computers do this by now? All she’s doing is walking around and looking at land, making sure it’s still there. She’ll draw some lines and make some marks and as long as those lines and marks were the same as the old lines and marks, everything was a-ok. Feels like a camera should be able to do that pretty good. Cameras don’t get tired. You want them to watch, and watch they will. What about maybe drones? Drones could do the trick. If drones can make so many lives worse on the other side of the world, why couldn’t a drone make one life easier on this side of the world. Hah. Mila always made herself laugh on these walks. It’s that type of joke that made her a real catch of a person. No one else was willing to go there but, for better or for worse, she was. More than willing, even. Some would say that her sole purpose in life was to make the wrong joke at just the right time. If you were to ask the United States government, however, they would say differently. They’d say that her purpose is to survey the lands of our great nation and maintain our borders. Jokes are jokes, they’d say. Good for a hobby, not for a purpose, they’d say, and Mila would probably agree with them on that general idea. Jokes are a lot, but they aren’t everything. She would start to differ around where they say that walking around in some forest with a wheel that clicks every so often, and some line and mark making tools, is a better purpose. She wonders if she could just lie about it, stay home and then tell them exactly what they want to hear. Yep It’s all still there. Every last rock and needle accounted for. But they’d probably track her. Oh, you thought you could outsmart our GPS satellite? Or the drone? We got you, Mila. We’ve always got you. Hah. Mila, always with a take. She sat down on a rock. Mila liked to sit on rocks more than anything else. If you get comfortable on a rock, you’ve really earned it. She liked that. Comfort you had to work for. The rock was on top of a nice hill that gave her a decent view of the valley below. Over that way, north she guesses, over a river, was the border to Canada. You wouldn’t know it was there one way or the other, there’s not a big line or anything. There are signs, but it’s easy to miss them. They’re spread pretty thin. Mila only knew it was there because it was her job to know. She knew it, because if she didn’t know it, bad things could happen. Say she was a little less precise one day than another and, all of the sudden, these United States of America were a little smaller and Canada was a little bigger. Do you know how much would have to happen to correct a mistake like that? At least four people would have to die. So Mila knew that border better than just about anyone. Not because she had a penchant for borders. She just didn’t want to have to deal with the kind of attention and paperwork that would come with failing your country like that. Beyond that, though, she wondered what the point of it all was. She had never been across. She couldn’t find the time, and perhaps more importantly she couldn’t find a reason. It all seemed the same to her. Same air. Same trees. Same squirrels. If it all moved just a couple feet one way or the other, would anyone really care?

1. I should be shopping in junk shops and trawling for chess sets and drinking from a half cup of water in the dog’s ear. I should be going somewhere by now. I should be cumming with a forked tongue two times a day and looking for scales in back alleyways. I should be rutting the stairway in your nice apartment with streaks of brown paint like sucking the dry teat of the liver red cow I should be sitting in her thumbprints or swallowing her into my cavernous chest, into the hole made to remove a few things (don’t worry about it). I have bones like the mint green toothpicks that snap when you aren’t looking due to spit damage, like what happened when the building came down. It was God spitting or the angels making dares-- it’s always the daring ones, isn’t it? I was wearing house slippers so I came downstairs just to look at the debris coming up and the girl with the raven hair (the kind that is a little blue green in the wrong lighting) was sitting and she was slim and boy those tits. I’m telling you. 2. I was sitting on the toilet the other day and I noticed a piece of gum stuck to my sole so I peeled it off and I said thank you for this gift and I placed it just under my chin with my other loose skin and I said thank you God and I finished my shit and I wiped very studiously because that’s what you have to do if you’re being good and I like to be good. I was going to tell you about the garden, think of that rich earth and everything you could plant there. I was thinking you could bring a TV out there and she could have her babies. We could give all the puppies away and maybe a Christmas tree, the kind that crinkles (like the popcorn bag when you want to steal it from your brother.) I’ve got to tell you about the couch and the good smell in one spot And I’d like to give you something for coming here... You like pizza? I can get you some pizza. We’ll string the pies out the window and let the cheese hang down like a sculpture, it’ll be just like an art gallery.the kids will come and suck on the greasy strings. I’ll puff up like a balloon and bloat away heeheehee. 3. And the beautiful room at the top of the house will memorialize itself with a gravestone refrigerator the newfangled kind they put into the ground with a pneumatic press, the kind they put a dead body in and it stays good for at least two weeks at least long enough to suck out the king’s piece. The pawns are all gone when you die, there’s only so much extension a body can handle but we don’t like to spend the queen too early and the bishops are mostly into ears, you know, jack in the pulpit kind of motherfuckers that don’t like to mess around, unlike myself in the moonlight on the good days when there’s a good sign

Transcript: Page 1 Recently I realized I love old class notes. How now they make no sense. after the class is gone digging further into the page with each thought burrowing deeper deeper deeper I threw away my old notes. Because they didn’t have art on them But maybe that was a mistake. The leaves are falling. Across the street their leaves are heart shaped the fake kind I wish my cousin well in his second marriage. I’ve been trying to write, but I haven’t been I can’t commit to words fucking circle speaker When writing essays, I write like a politician speaks. tend to (don’t commit) Maybe I can only write when I’m supposed to be listening - sorry Janet My mom stole catnip for the tigers. and drove cross country. maybe so To the South Page 2 I wish I capitalized that last “And” but I wrote this bitch in pen. I usually write with pencil, but I thought I’d dress it up with a deep ball point. Regret the fuck is this space? I’m unravelling, thread unwinding. I wish I were writing a novel I’m not I can’t every day feels like a new life 2020 I can’t commit to tomorrow Not yet. Call at 11 I like watching calligraphy, but that’s just envy. In those notes I threw away, I found a paper blank of words with drawings all in the margins leaving space for words that aren’t. I kept that one.